CANCER

Does it really all come down to the woman in the dry cleaner’s who by her vociferous silence

and the way she flings them down lets me know she’s espied the indelible yellow driblets

on the lining of my pants and hates me for them, thrusting them with loathing into their plastic

and not looking for an instant at my eyes, my face?—And for this that she won’t accept money

directly from my hand, making clear I’m to leave my filthy bill in the dent of the plastic tray,

that the change will be deposited there for my polluted, contagious fingers to extract?

Was it for this, this, becoming a patient, transformed to a shivering sack of blood to be spilled?

And the dark night tracing of malevolent lymph tracks, fear scaling the ice-rungs of my spine?

For this the surgeon’s blade slicing the fat of my gut, leaving that dismal shelf over my groin?

And the pain, the shuddering post-operative chill, the potassium burningly blown into my veins?

… But listen to me, complaining: Who cares if some snob-bitch turns up her nose at my crotch?

And you, cancer-fiend, still maybe spitting cells out into my bones and my brain, fuck you:

fuck you for Zweig, fuck you for Fagles, fuck you for McGrew and Minghella and the poets —

Cavafy and both Hugheses, and Ginsberg and Clifton and Jane Kenyon and even John Donne,

plus all the big public deals like Bogart and Marley and that Beatle, and also the beautiful starlet

who wouldn’t let them cut off her perfect breasts and so died of the fear of losing her beauty.

Too late for me to be frightened of losing my potbellied unbeauty, or anything else except maybe things

like remembering when Erv Goffman was dying and I said, “What will I do with only one superego?”

and he laughed, and I laughed, and what can you do, with everyone plucked out of your life except laugh?

Or not laugh, not every day, but not cry either, or maybe a little, maybe cry just a little, a little.